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Help:Vandalism and Spam
Vandalism is the conspicuous defacement or destruction of a structure, a symbol, or information against the will of the owner/governing body. In the context of an online community project, it is a usually deliberate attempt to damage the usefulness of content for other viewers. Assuming good faith Useful community content presents the widest range of relevant and accurate information on a topic. In the case of a wiki, if someone edits a page so it reflects only a single viewpoint, that can be considered vandalism. For example, if a page about a TV show character contains information both from the show itself and from spin-off shows, books, etc., and a user removes all information that isn't strictly from the main show, the other community members will likely see that as vandalism. However, to keep good faith, you might assume that this editor was only trying to show that any source of information on that character besides the main show isn't true canon, and shouldn't be in the article. In general, an edit that seems like deliberate vandalism is often just a clumsy attempt at editing by someone who is new to wikis, who simply didn't know the community's rules, or someone who didn't know how else to propose a change in how things are done on the wiki. In those cases, you can explain to that bad editor what they could do better, where they could go to discuss their ideas, and why certain things are just not allowed on your community, even if they're okay elsewhere. That way, a user who first seems a vandal can turn into a useful editor and member of the community. Unless you can clearly see that someone had bad intentions, always assume they just didn't know better, and offer your help! Avoiding critical mass Vandalism is often an aggressive attempt at getting a point across to the community, by an angry or spiteful user. You can try to defuse the situation by talking to the vandal, suggesting to work things out peacefully, or by explaining better ways to achieve what the vandal wants to achieve. If you alienate the editor, however - for example by insulting them right back - vandalism can turn into a form of vengeance. FANDOM has tools and mechanisms in place to minimize the effect of pranksters, and can even handle a few determined vengeful vandals, but dealing with a full-blown vandalism movement is much harder and costs a lot of time and effort. Because of this, you should assume good faith and react with kindness wherever possible, to avoid making the vandal(s) even more hateful, and to prevent a vandal attack from reaching critical mass. Dealing with vandalism In general, the best way to deal with vandalism is to revert the vandalism, block the vandal, and ignore any attempt from the vandal to bother you further. For more information on this, we recommend reading these three pages, which go into each of these steps in more detail: * * * There are measures administrators can put in place to help prevent vandalism before it begins: Two anti-vandalism extensions are used often on FANDOM. locks down the ability of specific user groups from being able to do basic actions, such as editing or creating pages or uploading images, for up to 12 hours. If a community is facing a surge of vandalism, the VSTF or FANDOM Staff can enable ProtectSite to prevent new, unregistered, or even non-sysop users from being able to do those particular things. The other extension is , which allows skilled coders to block the submission of edits if certain conditions are met, for example if a particular rude or inappropriate word is included in the new text. Admins and FANDOM staff can also turn off anonymous editing in if anonymous accounts (identified by their IP number) continually cause problems on a community. Video tutorial on reverting, deleting, and rollback Spam is unwanted advertisements and links to other websites. What to do if you find spam? * Remove the link or the edit in which it was added, and the account that added it if they persist. * If it is a lot of spam, you can contact our Volunteer Spam Task Force. How does FANDOM fight spam? FANDOM uses a number of tools that are built into the software to help us fight spam: * Phalanx, an integrated spam defense tool, prevents certain actions against an integrated blacklist. All users can suggest additions to this list through the VSTF Wiki. ** Blocking of spammers across all wikis ( ). ** Filtering commonly spammed phrases used in article text or edit summaries can be added to the article filter using regex. ** Filtering commonly used spammed titles can be added to the same article filter to prevent their recreation. ** Filtering commonly used wiki subdomains used by cross-wiki spambots. * for external links added by unregistered users and for account creation. * Tools (LookupContribs and MultiLookup) which allow , , the and certain users to check for edits by a particular user or IP address across all wikis. * Nofollow links are added to all external URLs. See the Google blog for details. * Old revisions of articles are not indexed by search engines. * A tool for searching for spammers using multiple usernames ( ). * Bots using algorithms that run against an IRC feed of all recent changes to automatically detect spam. * A tool to mass delete page titles created by spammers (Special:Multidelete). * Automated deletion of all pages by an IP/User on a specific wiki (Special:Nuke). * One-click reverting for local admins and users who have been assigned " " status. * " " for the most severe cases of spam attacks allowing admins to temporarily lock down the wiki against uploads, account creations, or edits by unregistered or all users. What types of spam exist and how do we deal with it? ;Spam articles :Where the aim is to promote a particular company rather than to provide useful content to readers of the wiki, should be rewritten or deleted. ;External link spamming :Often carried out by robots that may be spamming many wikis at once. Their aim is to improve their search engine rankings, rather than to directly advertise their product. :If you find such spam, please report it to the with as many useful links as possible. :Additionally, if you are an on the wiki being spammed, you can block the user or IP doing the spamming if required.